BEIRUT — Syria escalated tensions with Turkey on Monday, accusing its neighbor and former friend of imperialist delusions harking back to the centuries of Ottoman dynastic rule, as Syrian army gunners exchanged artillery blasts with their Turkish counterparts across the border for the sixth consecutive day.
Both insurgent sympathizers and the Syrian government described an extremely violent day in the nearly 19-month-old uprising in the country, with unverified accounts of killings and destruction in the embattled cities of Aleppo, Homs, Daraa and in northern Idlib province, where members of the rebel Free Syrian Army claimed to have discovered a massacre committed by security forces at a makeshift prison.
“Syria is aware that Turkey cannot go a step further,” said Ali Tekin, assistant professor of International Relations at Ankara’s Bilkent University. “The Turkish people don’t want a war and there are no vital national interests at stake to warrant a war. Syria sees this.”
There were also signs that the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, which has been plagued by leadership dysfunction and factionalism, was attempting to make itself more relevant to a future political solution by convening a special conference next week in Doha, Qatar.
In what appeared to be part of that effort, the council’s president, Abdulbaset Sieda, was quoted in a telephone interview with The Associated Press as saying the group would not rule out a future role for any members of President Bashar Assad’s government, as long as they had not ordered or participated in killings, which by some estimates have left more than 20,000 Syrians dead.
But that idea was derisively dismissed Monday by Syria’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, in a reaction reported by the official Syrian Arab News Agency. Zoubi accused the Turkish government of behaving as though it had reverted to the geopolitics of Ottoman dominance that shaped the Middle East for more than 600 years, before that monarchy was abolished in 1922.
“Turkey isn’t the Ottoman Sultanate,” Zoubi was quoted by the agency as saying. “The Turkish Foreign Ministry doesn’t name custodians in Damascus, Mecca, Cairo and Jerusalem.”
Zoubi said the Turkish foreign minister’s statements reflected “obvious political and diplomatic confusion and blundering.”
That verbal exchange coincided with word that Turkey had shelled Syrian targets across the border Monday after a Syrian shell hit the Altinozu district of Hatay province, where farmers were working. The semiofficial Anatolian News Agency said there were no injuries.
Turkey and Syria once enjoyed one of the strongest friendships among Middle East neighbors. They grew estranged after Assad’s government brutally suppressed the political opposition that started with peaceful demonstrations in March 2011. Turkey’s government has since called Assad unfit to govern and has said he should resign. Turkey is also providing sanctuary to an estimated 100,000 Syrian civilians and support to elements of the armed insurgency.
